Intel Launches Z77 Motherboards, Preparing For Ivy Bridge 58
MojoKid writes "In preparation for the arrival of their 3rd Generation Core processor products based on their Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, Intel has readied a new chipset dubbed the Z77 Express. New socket 1155 Ivy Bridge processors offer 16 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 or 3.0 connectivity on-die and they feature integrated dual-channel, DDR3 memory controllers with maximum officially supported speeds of up to 1600MHz. The processors are linked to the Z77 chipset via Intel's FDI (Flexible Display Interface) and 20Gb/s DMI 2.0 interfaces. The chipset itself is outfitted with 8 more PCIe 2.0 lanes, six ports of SATA (II and III), an integrated Gigabit MAC, and digital display outputs for up to three displays. Making its debut for the first time in an Intel chipset is also native USB 3.0 support with four USB 3.0 and ten USB 2.0 ports built in."
Re:Nice Spec - But.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nice Spec - But.... (Score:5, Informative)
Uhh, LGA1155 boards have been able to do 32GB of RAM since a year and a half ago, as had LGA1156 boards before that.
Re:Nice Spec - But.... (Score:5, Informative)
I would certainly hope your servers have more than 16 gigabits of RAM.
As with most Intel chipset releases, there really isn't much to get excited about here. "Native" USB3 might be exciting to someone somewhere, but from a practical standpoint we've been getting USB3 on motherboards for the last couple years anyway, and extra PCIe lanes are for the most part only interesting to nutball gamers.
Z-series chipsets are enthusiast products. Basically all this stuff just integrates features that are already on $150+ motherboards into Intel's chips.
I give this a hearty "meh."
Re:thunderbolt = only a x8 + x4 pci-e 3.0 slots (Score:5, Informative)
Score: -3; Factually Incorrect
1) no, you get 16x PCIe 2.0 as a fallback if the card does not support PCIe 3.0
2) if you want SLI/CF, you can use either 8x PCIe 3.0 or 8x PCIe 2.0 for the two graphics card slots. No current graphics card saturates PCIe 2.0 8x, so this is more than sufficient for 2 way SLI/CF.
3) USB 3 and SATA 6 are not on the PCIe bus at all, so they don't leach bandwidth.